Howard Blume reports in the Los Angeles Times that a charter school in the chain founded by convicted felon Ref Rodriguez closed due to low enrollment. It had projected a student body of 275 but only 114 signed up.
“On the fourth day of its second school year, an Eagle Rock charter school closed its doors this week, leaving parents and students disappointed, angry and tearful — and bucking the usual narrative of ceaseless charter growth.
“PUC iPrep Charter Academy had dual-language programs in English and either Spanish or Mandarin — the sort of offerings that are usually popular. But it was in an area with too many good school options, and it enrolled too few students.
“It may or may not have been a factor that the school was part of Partnerships to Uplift Communities, the group of charter schools co-founded by Ref Rodriguez, who resigned from the Los Angeles Board of Education in July after pleading guilty to criminal charges related to his campaign for office.
The school aimed to enroll 275 students this year, although the organization told parents it would try to make things work with 200. But by Wednesday, it had only 114 students — and PUC’s board voted to shut it down.”
Charter advocates like to claim that tens of thousands of students are on charter waiting lists, but those lists are never audited, and in the rare instances when anyone checks (it happened in Boston), the waiting list contained names of students who had applied to multiple charters and had long ago been enrolled elsewhere.
Those waiting lists are the same as the lists the internet schools report for enrollment purposes — ghost lists. If anyone dug deep enough, they would discover that those lists are “fake” lists.
This is called “Marketing” PLOYS. Good GAWD. People need to learn about PROPAGANDA Techniques. They assault us every day.
Dump is ONE huge propaganda machine. All he does is LIE and TWIST. He and his gangster mob should BE USED as an example of propaganda machine.
It is an all-purpose marketing ploy. It is widely used to get seniors to rush their decisions about assisted living and continuing care facilities.
There simply is no way to solve these problems. You can’t get a facility(buy or rent) until you are approved at your local district. Then, if you do get approved, there may not be a suitable building available, especially with limited time to arrange the details. That’s one reason a charter may have to relocate in another area. BUT, the charter petition is very specific in terms of the kind of student population and location. So, in a city as diverse as Los Angeles, moving can make a ton of difference. This is one area of the law that just doesn’t work, period. And in the case of iPrep, the surrounding area was already saturated with charters and top traditional schools.
So, how much state money was wasted on this school? That’s what we really need to find out because this is money that could have been used to do things like reduce class size, bring in more librarians, nurses and the arts.
Parents with kids coming out of preschool enter their kid on every charter lottery just in case, not necessarily because they want to enroll their kid there. Charters end up with long wait lists of people who are actually planning on sending their kid somewhere else.
Yes, the “long wait lists” is also used by charters in NYC. The SUNY Charter Institute board (which is long overdue for a real investigation into their questionable favoritism and lack of oversight) uses those “long wait list” claims to justify placing charters in places where there is almost no demand.
The claim of “wait lists” is such a farce. By the standard that charter schools use to claim “wait lists”, there are many times more 8th graders on “wait lists” for NYC public high schools than there are 8th graders period! For example, there were 128,000 “applications” by 8th graders for seats at just 20 NYC public high schools. There are fewer than 10,000 total 9th grade seats in those 20 high schools, so by the standards used by charter schools, there were over 118,000 8th graders on “wait lists” for just those schools. Of course, only some 77,000 8th graders even applied to public high schools, but no matter. Charters would insist that each student be counted in multiple wait lists just like they do.
PUBLIC schools could surely play this game: imagine how the average citizen’s opinion of public schools would change if only the “image” of public schools was changed.
Wow, those are really interesting numbers! Wish I had the stats from my area. Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute regularly trolls a local public education Facebook page here in AZ with those same claims…the charter wait lists are so long, therefore we must continue to replace the public schools with more charters. What a racket!
This phantom waiting list being one of the pillars of Ref’s run for the LAUSD School Board back in 2015.
This “fact” or rather, this total fabrication was mentioned in every expensive TV commercial, and every gosh darn one of those millions of mailer that was sent to voters …
” (then-incumbent & charter critic) Bennett Kayser is denying low-income Latino parents access to those great PUC schools and other charter schools that they so desperately want, as tens of thousands of parents & kids of color languish on a growing waiting list to attend charter schools, thanks to Kayser … blah-blah-blah … ” ~?
So only 114 kids showed during the last two weeks? (LAUSD’s new school year started on Tuesday, August 14)
Can’t they just fill up the school with parents on that waiting list?
Oh, that’s right. That was all a lie.
Apparently, since Ref’s becoming a convicted felon, and his leaving his LAUSD School Board seat in total disgrace, parents aren’t so keen on keeping their kids at PUC, taking them out and/or not choosing PUC for their kids’ school.
(To be precise, PUC IS Ref’s former charter chain, which he co-founded.)
I’ve spent much of the summer going over school demographics and SBAC scores for LAUSD’s independent charter schools [the intention was to see how many of them are failing to enroll adequate numbers of special education students, but it’s providing greater insight than simply that] and will provide you with this snapshot:
Of LAUSD’s 171 independent charters with 3+ years of data, 121 (70.8%) of them have lost enrollment over the last 3 years…
Of LAUSD’s 14 independent charters with only 2 years of data, 3 of them have lost enrollment over that time…
LAUSD has 9 independent charters that have been open for only 1 year…
For the last three years, the State of California has no record of data for 13 of LAUSD’s independent charters (or it has not been made accessible to the public.) When I sent LAUSD a FOIA request [Office of the General Counsel Control # 0044177: June 23, 2018] for data from those 13 independent charters they sent me the following reply (dated July 2nd, 2018):
“As required under California Government Code section 6253, the District will make a determination within 10 days as to whether or not a request is seeking records that are publicly disclosable and, if so, to provide the estimated date that the records will be made available. There is no requirement for a public agency to actually supply the records within 10 days of receiving a request, unless the requested records are readily available, Still, the District prides itself on always providing all publicly disclosable records in as timely a manner as possible.
Lillian Hernandez,
Administrative Secretary to the General Counsel”
I’m still waiting, and I’m sure that I’ll wait for a long time after the 2018 SBAC scores come out (end of September). I’ll put the 2018 numbers in when they are made available (will undoubtedly have to make new FOIA requests) and eventually post it all.
Steve M
Thank you for giving public records a try. The charter industry is not growing at the rate wanted, do their representatives are inventing schemes to expand into suburbs and rural areas described at “deserts” meaning census tracks with not enough “choice” among schools—even if there are public schools and little or no problems with enrollments.
In Ohio they inflate the projected demand during the charter application/approval process and because there’s no real analysis of whether the projections are valid and no one questions the numbers they submit they “flood” places with charters.
I bet they do the same thing in California.
One of the ways ed reformers mislead on charter schools is they glide over the fact that charter process is incredibly complicated. To fix any of it you would first have to know where the fraud is creeping in and that can be nearly impossible for outsiders to do.
Ed reformers act as if government contracting (which is what charters are) is simple. It’s not at all simple. There are endless opportunities to game these systems at every point in the process.
Go to any of the larger charters in Ohio and try to find out who is actually running these schools and where the money goes. As an ordinary member of the public you will not be able to do it with publicly-available information.
Just the AUTHORIZER piece is complex, and that’s only one layer of 6 or 7.
I’m convinced the governance system ed reformers invented is fatally flawed.
It’s just bad government. It’s too complex, has way too many private entities entwined in it, and it’s not nearly transparent enough. It’s poorly designed.
Big shoutout to Ref Rodriguez and the rest of the fraudulent, money laundering, embezzling, labor mistreating, greedy criminals opening and closing charter scams. Taxes wasted. Education degraded. Middle class dismantled. Public schools defunded. Segregation enabled. Charges plea bargained. Progress stagnant.
Totally awesome.
Good! PUC deserves to be shut down completely. Teachers are not the problem; administration and leadership are. Those kids who were originally scheduled to attend this school can enroll at Eagle Rock High, one of LAUSD’s generally better schools.
*Eagle Rock is a grade 7-12 school. The 6th graders will have to attend a different feeder school.
I don’t know about the West Coast. Here in Washington DC, most of the charter schools have more applicants, than slots available. The dual-language school has the longest waiting list. see
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dual-language-charter-schools-attract-the-longest-waiting-lists-in-dc/2018/04/17/b652312c-427c-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6a20b45b0e1f
Most charter waiting lists are fraudulent.
They include names of kids who applied for multiple charters and names of kids already enrolled in a school.
The charter “waiting list” is propaganda.